23 October: Mole Day

Today is Mole Day. While it’s actually an unofficial celebration by chemists, commemorating Avogadro's Number (6.02 x 10²³), a basic measuring unit in chemistry, I’m going rogue and using it as an excuse to present ten facts about moles, the animals which live underground.

1. Moles belong to the mammal family Talpidae, and the scientific name for the European mole is Talpa europaea. They are related to shrews, desmans and other small insectivores. The French word for mole is taupe, which has given its name to the colour of a mole’s fur. In Middle English, moles were known as moldwarp, which is similar to the words for the animal in German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic and essentially means “"one who throws soil" or "dirt tosser". Male moles are called "boars", females are called "sows". A group of moles is called a "labour".
2. You won’t often see a labour of moles, however, as not only do they spend most of their life underground but they are also solitary and only come together to mate. The exception is mole pups which have been driven out of the home burrow by their mother once they become self-sufficient at about five weeks old. They will live above ground until they find a vacant territory in which to build their own system of tunnels.
3. They’re adapted for a life underground. Their eyesight is poor but they have excellent senses of smell and touch. Their Blood cells have a special type of haemoglobin which allows them to use Oxygen more efficiently and tolerate higher levels of carbon dioxide than other mammals. Its fur is also adapted. Mole pelts are short and dense and have no particular direction to the nap. This means their fur is not "brushed the wrong way" if they reverse back along their tunnel. While this is good for the moles underground, it also made them targets for people wanting fur coats, like Queen Alexandra, the wife of Edward VII.
4. The mole’s diet consists almost entirely of earthworms and insect larvae which live underground. Their tunnels act as worm traps. The mole is able to detect when a worm has fallen into their tunnel and will go and get it, even if they’re not hungry, since they can paralyse a worm using toxins in their saliva and store them in underground larders to eat later. Mole larders containing more than a thousand worms have been found. Before they eat the worms a mole will squeeze any dirt out of its gut.
5. Moles are often viewed as pests, sometimes due to an erroneous belief that they eat the roots of crops and trees – they don’t, they only eat worms – but also because they create molehills which ruin the look of a lawn. In fact, moles actually do the soil good by digging it up and aerating it. Not only this, their tunnels improve soil drainage, which helps stop flooding and huge puddles forming on the ground.
6. In fact, molehills only appear when a new mole claims a territory. Once it has finished digging its main complex of tunnels you won’t even know it’s there. The soil in molehills makes good potting compost. The reason some gardeners seem to have an ongoing battle with moles is because, if they remove one mole, it’s only a matter of time before a new one moves in and builds a new set of tunnels, thus creating more molehills. On the subject of molehills, the expression "don't make a mountain out of a molehill", which means to exaggerate a problem, was first recorded in Tudor times. Another archaic or dialect word for a molehill is a 'wantitump'.
7. As creatures which live underground, mythology often connects them with death and the underworld.
8. Moles were once hunted for their feet as much as their fur. A mummified mole foot was thought to protect the wearer from toothache. Another old wives tale was that bags of mole’s feet helped small children’s baby teeth come through. This may have come about because a mole’s foot resembles teeth in a jawbone. In the 17^th century, possession of a mole’s foot could be cited as evidence that a woman was a Witch.
9. There were some other pretty gruesome folk remedies associated with moles. Countless of the unfortunate creatures were made to suffer horribly in the name of human health. Pliny the Elder, for example, suggested that swallowing the still beating heart of a mole would bestow the power of divination and foreknowledge of future events, while removing a mole’s teeth while it was still alive and wearing them as charms would cure toothache. Other myths included that healing power was bestowed on anyone who held a mole in their hands until it died; that if you skinned and dried a male mole and ground it into powder, it would cure malaria; that blood from a freshly killed mole would cure warts; sugar dripped with blood from the nose of a living mole would control fits; cut a mole in half, or skin it alive, and worn on the neck until it rotted was a cure for cysts on the throat and goitre; biting a mole’s head off and sucking out its blood was a cure for epilepsy, or alternatively, the mole’s blood could be added to a glass of Wine.
10. Moles have their place in literature, too. William Horwood’s Duncton Wood and its sequels feature anthropomorphic moles living in Moledom, a community in Great Britain. These moles have a written language and some travel great distances between stone circles in England and Wales. The mole characters in the books include Bracken, Rebecca, Mandrake, Rune, Privet, Whillan, Tryfan and Beechen.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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